"The EME method is ideally suited to rapidly evaluate long waveguide structures where other rigorous methods such as FDTD can be computationally intensive and time consuming," according to Dr. James Pond, CTO of Lumerical Solutions. "It took a great deal of effort for my team to develop an extension to the standard EME approach, valid in both 2D and 3D, that offers FDTD-like accuracy for long structures employing continuous material or geometric variations. I am excited to work with our customers to apply this new solver to their most challenging waveguide component designs and help them get the results they have come to expect when working with Lumerical."

The standard EME method represents continuously varying structures, such as tapers, with a staircase approximation to resolve geometrical or material variations along the direction of propagation. This leads to non-physical reflections and calculation inaccuracies. The typical workaround involves increasing the number of expansion interfaces, which results in increased computational costs, both in terms of time and memory. Lumerical's CVCS method avoids this staircasing effect and, through extensive benchmarking versus 3D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations for a wide variety of waveguide structures, offers excellent accuracy at a fraction of the time for longer structures.

"In discussions with customers during our product planning sessions, there was very strong interest in seeing Lumerical develop an eigenmode expansion propagation tool," stated Bill De Vries, Director of Product Marketing at Lumerical Solutions. "We are working alongside leading customers during development to ensure it meets their expectations regarding compute time, accuracy and usability. Given our progress, I am confident our EME will be a very powerful addition to Lumerical's photonic design and analysis software."

Lumerical's EME propagation tool will be released as an extension of its MODE Solutions product in May, 2014. To learn more about Lumerical's CVCS-enhanced eigenmode expansion tool, visit www.lumerical.com/eme.

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About Lumerical Solutions, Inc.Since its inception in 2003, Lumerical has pioneered breakthrough simulation technologies that help bring new optical product concepts to life. By empowering research and product development professionals with high performance optoelectronic design software that leverages recent advances in computing technology, Lumerical helps optical designers tackle challenging design goals and meet strict deadlines. Lumerical's design software solutions have been licensed in more than 30 countries by global technology leaders like Agilent, Aptina, ASML, Bosch, Canon, Harris, Northrop Grumman, Olympus, Philips, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics, and prominent institutions including Caltech, Harvard, Max Planck Institute, MIT, NIST, University of Tokyo and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.